Debo Band is not about Afro-funk revival, recreating some mythical gilded age of Ethiopian pop. Taking cues from vintage and contemporary artists unsung in the West, they unleash rolling grooves, serpentine melody lines, and urgently joyful vocals….
That’s from the PR pitch for the nine-city U.S. tour that Debo Band kicks off in their home city of Boston on July 27. While Debo Band may not be an “Afro-funk revival” band, they tear it up like a blast from the ’70s heyday of Ethiopian funk with a difference. They’re adding as much as they’re reviving, bringing in a bit of klezmer, avant-garde jazz and rock that highlights their origin in Boston and the diverse backgrounds and musical tastes of the bandmembers.
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INTERVIEW OF DANNY MEKONNEN — first week in August
CONCERT REVIEW — Debo band will be hitting my home turf on August 6 when the play at Sweet’s Ballroom in Oakland and I’ll be there to see if the live show is as hot as their EP FLAMINgoh (Pink Bird Dawn), four tracks from their 2010 African tour.
Excellent article by Ted Swedenburg on Khaled and rai — debunks prevalent misconceptions about both. Brilliant! Check out Ted’s HawgBlawg — well worth the time.
Cheb Khaled, the Algerian rai singer who is probably the best-known Arabic singer on the planet, was selected this summer as one of NPR’s 50 Great Voices. Banning Eyre, a regular commentator on World Music on NPR and producer for Afropop Worldwide who has worked tirelessly to promote music from Africa, including the Maghreb, introduced Khaled to the NPR audience. Unfortunately, his introduction of Khaled repeated several unfortunate and misleading myths about rai music. Eyre presents a picture of an exceptional artist who favors tolerance and peace, and whose courageous positions have angered many Muslims and forced him to take refuge in the West. Eyre depicts Khaled as well as a kind of “bad boy,” in the image of a U.S. rock’n'roller. Khaled, from “a land [Algeria] torn apart by intolerance and violence,” says Eyre, “stood out as an artist who embraced openness and peace.” The real story of Khaled is more interesting, one rooted in Algerian politics and in its large and vibrant musical scene.
There’s a lot of talk lately about why jazz has been losing its audience despite decades of efforts to build infrastructure. There is hardly a university music program that does not include a jazz studies program and jazz festivals (and affiliated community programs) abound. The place of jazz in musical histories is secure and the tension between the “classical” and “revolutionary” approaches to jazz historiography seems no longer relevant with the revolutionary voices having left the field (or at least become as absent from the media landscape as jazz itself seems to be — who’s carrying on Frank Kofsky‘s work now that he’s gone). The deep rooting of jazz in the African American experience has been subverted by its widespread acceptance as America’s classical music, its one true art form. I think this has implications for the survival of jazz as a vibrant part of America’s soundscape. The classicizing of jazz has been going on for a while.
The publication of Grover Sales’ Jazz: America’s Classical Music in 1984 sparked an intellectual and cultural frenzy. Sales not only transformed jazz from a cultural product rooted in the African American experience to a cultural product rooted in the American experience, but he also reclassified jazz (an urban folk music) as a national classical music. Whether or not Sales was the first to meAntion jazz as America’s classical music is not as important as the amount of publicity the idea received from the first printing of his text…. Today, jazz is more highly regarded as America’s classical music rather than America’s “rare and valuable national treasure.” In my opinion, these are two diametrically opposed concepts. (The Non-Classical Nature of America’s Classical Music by Emmet G. Price III in All About Jazz, 2003).
In my opinion, there has been a big downside to the success of the classicizing of jazz. Like European classical music, there is a general perception that the best jazz has to offer is firmly entrenched in the past, and not in the sense of a tradition and roots to draw upon but dead masters to venerate. This approach stultifies symphony programs and pushes innovative music to the margins. It seems to be doing the same to jazz.
After being exposed to Brian Wilson Reimagines Gershwin — a piteous collection of pop dreck — I reluctantly turned my attention to the Turtle Island String Quartet’sHave you ever been…? While the latter’s set of Hendrix covers has not received the level of acclaim that Wilson’s butchering of the songs of the Gershwin brothers, it stands head and shoulder’s above it in terms of inventiveness and musicality. [I came to both these cds via NPR's music website, which features an interesting mix of artists but has never raised a critical eyebrow.]
“Reimagining” the works of classic artists is nothing new to Turtle Island String Quartet. Their previous interpretations of John Coltrane also hit the mark (on A Love Supreme). Here’s a sample, their rendition of “My Favorite Things” informed by Coltrane’s inspired 1961 recording of the Rodgers & Hammerstein composition.
(1) A short excerpt from AMERICAN ARAB, an in-progress Kartemquin Films documentary by Usama Alshaibi, featuring Marwan Kamel of the Taqwacore band Al-Thawra.
(2) Another repost from Tales from Bradistan with some great photos of the Kominas
Following the ending of the taqwacore tour in the UK, Boston band The Kominas stayed on in order to play more shows. A hastily arranged session was put together in Bradistan and held at the Bradistan Playhouse. There was barely over twenty-four hours time to promote the gig plus it coincided with the world cup final so it was no surprise that it was very sparsely attended.
The gig was about as punk as it gets – no stage, half a drum kit with no microphones, no monitors and buzzing guitar leads – but the sound wasn’t that bad. The Kominas put in a typically energetic performance that lasted for around an hour. In the end they were taking requests from the audience and everyone who attended left satisfied.
Here is a selection of photographs that I took at the concert.
Working on a couple of posts but still too busy to put much time into it. In the meantime, here’s a repost of a Jon Pareles piece (N.Y. Times) on how Bassekou Kouyati has revolutionized the use of the ngnoi but first here’s a YouTube video of Kouyati with another “revolutionary” who has taken the banjo into new territory (in this case, you could call it a post-modern encounter with an ancestor).
Chester Higgins Jr./The New York Times: Bassekou Kouyate and Ngoni Ba Mr. Kouyate with the ngoni, a traditional lute from Mali that dates back hundreds of years, performed with his band at SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday.
There were no Western instruments onstage when the Malian griot Bassekou Kouyate and his band, Ngoni Ba, performed at SummerStage in Central Park on Sunday afternoon. Ngoni Ba is a string band — four sizes of ngoni, a four-stringed African lute that’s an ancestor of the banjo — with Mr. Kouyate’s wife, Amy Sacko, as lead singer, along with two percussionists playing calabashes and tama, a West African pressure drum. The band wore African clothes, and the songs were in Bambara, Mali’s main language. One, a meditative 17th-century praise song that Ms. Sacko sang in expanding arabesques, delved into 2,000-year-old Malian history.
But this was no traditional African concert. Through technique, technology and open ears, Mr. Kouyate hurls the ngoni into the 21st century. After performing in groups with notable Malian musicians like Ali Farka Touré and Toumani Diabaté, Mr. Kouyate has taken an instrument traditionally used to accompany a singer, pushed it into the foreground and multiplied it into an ensemble.
The bass and tenor-register ngonis in Ngoni Ba, founded in 2005, were invented by Mr. Kouyate, and they bring extra layers of counterpoint to what was already intricate, quick-fingered music. Traditional musicians play the ngoni in their laps while seated; (to read more…)
I am the revolution and you are the revolution
In your spirit you have the power
In your heart lies the secret
From your lips spills the truth
That the wine of power is in our blood
Together we can make a revolution
Tell your comrades
I am the revolution
We are the revolution
Recently I drove over to Preston to meet two of the bands that are at the forefront of thetaqwacore scene in the USA. I already wrote about The Kominas with some thoughts about the documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth Of Punk Islam. The other band on the tour were Al Thawra (“The Revolution” in arabic) from Chicago, a group that were not given much airtime in that film but certainly deserve greater recognition.
Al Thawra are a trio but on this trip they had expanded to four members. Syrian-Polish-American Marwan Kamel sings and plays guitar; Matt Scott stood in for the absent bassist Mario Salazar; Micah Bezold was on drums; and Adam Jennings from Winters In Osakaguested by playing the sampler. (to read on…)
Histories of American popular music have tended to create a clear bifurcation of “White” and “Black” musical genres. Country music has been portrayed as a genre primarily drawn from Anglo-Scottish roots. The significant influences of African Americans on the genre have been diminished or placed in a carefully constructed pre-history. African American musical genres have also been defined within strict boundaries—stripped of areas of inter-cultural contact, influence and collaboration. This separation was largely created by the commercial music industry during the 1920′s when widespread recording of “blues” and “hillbilly” artists began in the South. A&R representatives of northern record companies were instrumental in shaping the repertoire of black and white artists along perceived lines of marketability. The “blues craze” of the 1920′s had a particularly dramatic effect on the future of African American popular music. Most African American performers had a large repertoire of different types of songs but the only material most record companies wanted to record were blues. This had a powerful effect on shaping the perception of African American music that was subsequently reflected in scholarship on the blues. Early blues scholars were often preoccupied with looking for “authentic” blues, material uncolored by intercultural contact, not only with “White” music but also with commercial forms of African American music that they perceived as less authentically “Black.” Styles of the blues were legitimized by separating them from other styles of music and by constant reference back to their roots in rural black culture. (Callen, “A Deconstruction of a Constructed Genre: A Critical View of the Oakland Blues” presented at the 44th Annual Meeting of the Society for Ethnomusicology in Austin, Texas. October 1999.)
The quote is from my first conference presentation as an ethnomusicologist based on research I’d done on the West Coast Blues in which I’d found that the clear separations made between Black and White musical traditions in the U.S. were a misrepresentation of a history of continual exchange. It was something that was obvious and I should have known but ran contrary to the common sense version of American history that I had accumulated. My research on the West Coast Blues began my interest in the process of genre definition and those frequent moments when genre categories are inadequate and transgression is necessary and inevitable. Lately, it’s been interesting to watch the rediscovery (again) of the connections between jazz and country music — did everyone really forget Texas Swing and Bluegrass? Below are a couple of excerpts from an excellent Jazz Times article by Geoffrey Himes on the history of jazz / country collaborations and a new crop of “fusions” worth checking out — and advocacy for a definition of jazz less as a genre or style than as a process that can be applied to any musical material. The article is well worth reading in its entirety.
When Sonny Rollins released his Way Out West album in 1957, the cover featured the tall tenor saxophonist standing out in the desert between a bleached cow skull and a multi-armed cactus. In the William Claxton photo, Rollins cradled his horn like a six gun, planted his fist by his holster and peered out slyly from beneath a big gray cowboy hat. The cowboy theme carried over into the music as the trio of Rollins, bassist Ray Brown and drummer Shelly Manne played “I’m an Old Cowhand,” “Wagon Wheels” and the leader’s title tune.
It was an important record for several reasons. For one, the piano-less format allowed Rollins the harmonic freedom to break with bebop orthodoxy and to follow his melodic inspiration wherever it led. For another, it challenged the assumption that only blues, ballads and show tunes were the proper materials for jazz improvisation. The album proved that country music, even ersatz country music like Johnsy Mercer’s “I’m an Old Cowhand,” could inspire great jazz performances.
Rollins wasn’t the first to point this out. After all, in 1930 Louis Armstrong had played trumpet on “Blue Yodel No. 9” by the “Father of Country Music,” Jimmie Rodgers. Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys had recorded “Basin Street Blues,” one of Armstrong’s signature tunes, in 1946. But Rollins was one of the first jazz musicians to embrace country music so emphatically.
It has taken a long time, but country music is now winning grudging acceptance from the jazz world. One of 2008’s best-selling jazz releases was the Wynton Marsalis and Willie Nelson collaboration, Two Men With the Blues (Blue Note). This country-jazz hybrid was new territory for Marsalis, but Nelson has been singing and picking jazz standards all his life and even recorded a jazz-guitar record, The Gypsy, with Jackie King in 2001.
Another key release last year was Charlie Haden’s Rambling Boy (Decca), a collection of old country songs he sang as a young boy in the Haden Family. Before he moved to Los Angeles and joined the Ornette Coleman Quartet, Haden sang with his parents and siblings on the radio in Iowa and Missouri. Haden first hinted at those origins on his 1997 duo album with Pat Metheny, Beyond the Missouri Sky. Now Haden revisits the actual songs of the Haden Family with help from his kids, Metheny, Elvis Costello and such country stars as Rosanne Cash, Vince Gill and Ricky Skaggs.
Jenny Scheinman, the jazz violinist who has recorded with Bill Frisell, Norah Jones and John Zorn, released two KOCH label albums in 2008. Crossing the Field is an instrumental jazz record with Frisell and Jason Moran, but Jenny Scheinman is a vocal project, featuring country and folk songs recorded with fellow members of Frisell’s band. (to read the rest)
Rollins, Haden and their fellow fusioneers take the approach that jazz is primarily a process, not a repertoire. Almost any piece of music can be given an elastic syncopation, substitute chords and theme-and-variation improvisation. Some tunes may work better than others, but Rollins has demonstrated that a successful tune might as easily be a calypso as a show tune, a Hank Williams song as readily as a George Gershwin number.
“Jazz can use any source material,” argues Scheinman. “Jazz is an approach, and you can start with any melody and make it work for improvisers. The tune is just the conversation topic, and you can take the topic anywhere you want.”
“That’s what’s so amazing about jazz,” Frisell agrees. “That’s why it’s such a perfect world to be in. I don’t think there are any rules as far as what you use as source material. It’s more about having the opportunity to take what you know, to draw from your experience, and do whatever you want with it. All my heroes—Sonny Rollins, Miles Davis, Thelonious Monk—took the music that was around them, the music that they liked, and transformed it through their own eyes.”
If this is true, if jazz is a process that can be worked on any ingredients, what are the advantages of turning to country music for raw materials? Well, the genre is full of gorgeous melodies, aching emotions and rural textures that have been largely untouched by the jazz world. While blues, ballads and show tunes have been worked to exhaustion, country music represents a largely unplowed field. Here is a wealth of material just waiting to be alchemized into jazz, if only musicians and audiences can overcome their prejudices.
I’ll have some original material up next week but until then here’s another installment in the excellent series on Taqwacore from my sadiqi at Tales from Bradistan.
After being brought over to the UK to perform at a special night at London’s prestigiousMeltdown Festival, taqwacore bands from the USA The Kominas and Al Thawra undertook a short tour that took in half a dozen dates in England and Scotland. I travelled over toPreston to meet them, take pictures and hear them play live.
The Kominas are one of the main bands featured in the documentary film Taqwacore: The Birth Of Punk Islam. Hailing from Boston, three of the members are of Pakistani origin and the fourth from India. On this tour they were joined by Elester Richard, a black American trumpet player who adds a different dimension to their sound.
The bands that make up this taqwacore scene are regularly described as Islamic punk. On their latest CD “Escape To Blackout Beach”, The Kominas sound more power pop than punk (although their first effort “Wild Nights In Guantanamo Bay” is quite a bit heavier). Live, they play much faster and with more energy and watching them reminds me of my misspent youth where I was seeing punk bands every week. (click here to read the rest)
The final night of this year’s Jewish Music Festival features performances by two groups that stretch the usual definitions of diasporic music (Jewish or otherwise). French “world & bass” group Watcha Clan is dedicated to making music that advocates for nomadic peoples, for whom national boundaries are an inconvenient detail. It’s roots music where the roots intertwine with each other, creating a technologically enhanced vision of a world of unfettered movement. In that context, the idea of a “pure” music, or culture, is an anomaly. Sephardic and Ashkenazi music are integral parts of the mix, brought to the band by vocalist Sistah K (daughter of an Algerian Berber Jewish father and a Lithuanian Jewish mother). Opening the night is the San Francisco-based punk/funk/Balkan/Jewish band Charming Hostess, presenting their own take on diasporic music. Sunday, July 18 at YerbaBuenaCenter for the Arts (701 Mission St., San Francisco). YBCA.org
